Friday, April 23, 2010

Warning Order: Lost Fantasy Game to Replace Lost

Inspired by last night's NFL draft and the Sports Guy's frequent fantasy drafts of non-sport stuff such as realtiy TV shows, I am proposing that we here at the Spew have a fantasy draft of who will be alive at the end of the Lost series finale. Of course, this gets quite complicated since characters have been known to die and then be resurrected (Siyad) and more importantly to live in one world and die in the other (Libby, Charlie, Locke, etc).

I will be the final arbiter of what counts as alive--it is my game and my blog. I MAKE THE RULES!!

Ok, enough of that, what are these rules, oh fantasy Lost league commissioner for life?

I will create a list of eligible characters (see further below). On Tuesday, the folks in the league (just wait a second) will take turns picking their players via the comments section of the Tuesday blog (as Lost is not showing a new episode apparently).

Draft order--once I have the names, I will randomly select them to create an order and then post the order of the picks to be made by Tuesday morning. The draft will be snake like, with the order being 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1 2 .....

With eight players, I think five rounds of the draft make sense.

The draft will commence Tuesday evening since we will all have free time that night, but will go on until the following Tuesday if necessary.

For each player who is alive at the end of the finale, you get five points. If a person you choose is the winning Candidate, you get ten points.

If the two realities both end up existing and neither one has a superior reality-ness to it, then we will count points for the characters in both realities. Hint: choosing folks who are already dead in one reality may not be the best strategy, but could provide for some sleepers in the later rounds of the draft. That is, you are then betting on which reality trumps if there is trumping.

If one reality clearly trumps the other, then we will count only the trumper and not the trumped.

If there is much confusion about this, we can debate this after the finale. I can be persuaded (bought?).

If a character can only be deduced to be alive due to omission (that their destiny is not clear by end of the finale), then a character that is assumed to be alive earns one 2 points (for instance, probably Jack's ex Sarah).

Zombies do not count as alive, but Zombies with a heart of gold do (Siyad counts as alive again if he shows any free will, which we think he already did but are not completele sure).

I was tempted to include negative points for folks who are killed but that would change the strategy for some folks towards risk aversion (drafting secondary characters with arcs that are likely to be boring) and turn this into a death pool, rather than the life-affirming life pool it is.

The stakes: the winner gets to send me text that I must post on my blog as a blog post, not just a comment. It can be their take on Lost and its finale, it can be a brutal critique of any or all Spew posts, it can be a personal vignette of how I embarrassed myself somewhere in this reality, it can make fun of me in ways that I have not yet imagined (or in ways that I have already imagined), etc.

And if the winner is someone I actually interact with in real life on a occasion, they get a free beer (not wine, just beer, sorry Wendy) or, in honor Desmond, Scotch, and so does the second place person.

Signing up: The first eight people to sign up via comments to this post are in.

Who is fair game (as listed in wikipedia):

Richard Alpert

Kate Austen

Juliet Burke

Boone Carlyle

Ana Lucia Cortez

Michael Dawson

Mr. Eko

Daniel Faraday/Widmore

Nikki Fernandez

James Ford

Desmond Hume

Sayid Jarrah

Jin-Soo Kwon

Sun-Hwa Kwon

Frank Lapidus

Charlotte Lewis

Ben Linus

Claire Littleton

Walt

John Locke

Smokey

Charlie Pace

Paulo

Hurley

Shannon

Jack

Libby

Miles

Ilana

Aaron

Leslie Artz

Cindy the flight attendant

Emma (kid #1 that Cindy is attending)

Zach (kid #2 that Cindy is attending)

Rose

Bernard

Vincent the dog

Alex Rousseau

Karl, Alex's boyfriend

Dogen

Lennon

Jungle Boy that scares Smokey

Ethan

Goodwin

Tom Friendly

Eloise Hawking/Widmore

Charles Widmore

Pierre Chang

Alvar Hanso

Roger Linus

Penny Widmore

Charlie Widmore, Penny and Desmond's child

Matthew Abaddon

Naomi

Zoe

Anthony Cooper

Kate's Mom

Nadia

Jae Lee

Cassidy Phillips

Sarah Sheperd (Jack's ex)

Helen Norwood

Liam, Charlie's brother

Hurley's mom

Hurley's dad

Jacob (the big kahuna)

I am open to modifications/adjustments as recommending by players and non-players like.

And if you want to post draft strategies, you are welcome to it. I will post a strategy guide of sorts Tuesday before the draft. One hint now: betting that woman will survive because Cuse and Lindelof are either sexist or romantics and thus choosing Kate and Sun might make sense, but remember they had no compunction about killing Shannon, Ana Lucia, Libby, and most recently Ilana (and other women in between).

19 comments:

Chip
said...

I'll go in on this, but I'll be abroad during last few episodes including season finale and won't get back home until May 30 (leaving May 13), at which time I'll have to frantically catch up on Hulu. So I won't be able to check into the Spew until after I catch up...

The draft will start 9pm Tuesday evening, Eastern Daylight time. If you cannot be online, you can provide with a list of your preferred draft picks (make it long enough) and I will put in the most highly-ranked candidate that is available for each of your turns in the draft.

I will post instructions for the draft when I put out the order, later today if I can get one more email.

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Greetings! I am a political scientist, specializing in International Relations, my research and teaching focus on ethnic conflict and civil-military relations. I watch way too much TV. I rant about American politics and a few about Canadian politics. I like to take ideas I once learned a long time ago and apply them to whatever strikes my fancy. I am now a CDFAI Fellow, so expect a few more posts on Canada's defence and foreign policies.